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Chicago: Showpad goes beyond Powerpoint to deliver immersive buyer experience by introducing the sales enablement industry’s first Augmented Reality features. The company believes that new innovative technologies can greatly change the dynamism of B2B sales conversion and AR will add memorable experiences for the customer with its visual delight. The AR features for B2B sales will primarily focus at offering enticing experiences to buyers for large and complex products.

Industry’s first unified sales enablement platform

Showpad claims that these new additions will enable salespeople to utilize 3D models with a 360-degree view that will educate and influence buyers while leaving a lasting impression on their minds about the products’ features and descriptions. At this point, the features are available only to iOS users through Apple’s ARKit.

Louis Jonckheere, Showpad’s Co-founder and Chief Product Officer said,“I think the great thing about AR is that it’s extremely immersive. If you think about a salesperson just walking a prospect through a few slides explaining, for example, the specifications of a product — it’s boring, it’s not really immersive.”

He further added that ‘by actually immersing yourself in AR, you’re talking about product, pointing at it, walking around it and maybe even highlighting specific areas. AR has definitely changed the dynamic of the sales conversation. It feels like it’s real, it’s happening in real time, it’s more vivid. It’s more engaging. It will definitely grab the attention of the prospect. I think AR has that magic touch, and we’re still in the early days of the technology.’

What value is it going to add in B2B sales?

According to an HBR report, AR spend is expected to hit an estimated $60 billion in 2020. Almost every major global organization across industries is going to leverage more interactive and immersive technologies – especially in the field of marketing. Followed by Apple’s ARKit and Snapchat’s AR Lenses, Facebook too has announced the launch of AR ads.

Salespeople in high-tech industries are given the task of selling large, technically complex products like medical devices, robotic arms, construction equipment, compressors and other intricate machinery. With Showpad’s new AR features, these businesses can easily avoid the expense and time to demonstrate these products in actual brick and mortar environments.

In the words Pieterjan Bouten, CEO and co-founder of Showpad, “Our Augmented Reality functionality delivers the buyer experience of the future – it’s visual, interactive and immersive; we’re empowering salespeople to not only tell buyers about their products, but also to virtually engage with them for a deeper level of understanding. We’re excited to be the first to deliver this functionality to the sales enablement industry and support our customers as they compete in the digital world.”

According to Showpad, with these AR features, salespeople will be able to display the actual dimensions, features and framework of products in their environmental context, anywhere and anytime. Marketers can centralize and manage models within the app that will help them reduce cost and time of actual product manifestation. Adds Jonckheere, “We wanted to help our customers with large complex physical products, not only to tell prospects about their solutions through great digital content but be able to show them through a truly immersive buying experience,”. “Buyers want greater context and more information in their purchase experience, and AR enables them to see exactly what they’re getting. Now, they can have deeper, more interesting conversations about even the most complex products by seeing them in the context of their own environment.”